Most
legal professionals seek information from time to time about prospective
clients, competitors, and litigation opponents. To gather such
intelligence, researchers typically depend on commercial online services
and manual investigative techniques. In recent months, however, Internet
resources have played an important role in corporate intelligence
gathering.

Successful research strategy for discovering information about
businesses on the Internet begins with determining whether the company
has a home page. Businesses generally perceive home pages as a means
to market themselves or to communicate with existing clients. They may
provide annual reports, press releases, executive biographies,
information about products, services, research ventures, business
affiliations, and customers or clients. Without a doubt, such
information presents a solid beginning from which to launch exhaustive
research.

How does one ascertain the presence of a company home page? Several
methods exist for locating U.S. businesses. For instance, check a
directory that provides home page URLs. Such directories include
Infospace,
CompanyLink,
and Yahoo. Or try finding the
businesss domain name via Thomson & Thomsons
domain name finder or
Internics Whois
interface to its registration services. Then enter the domain
name, preceded by http://www., in a Web browsers open
URL command line.

Some businesses offer home pages via services like
Law Journal Extra. They may not
register a domain name. Finding these sites typically proves more
difficult and time consuming. It requires using popular search service
sites like Excite or
AltaVista, or
browsing industry pages like Bio Online,
when seeking a biotechnology company, or
InsWeb, when looking for
insurance companies.

Many businesses do not provide home pages; others offer content
unworthy of the time spent to locate it. In such cases, or even when a
business supplies meaningful information, researchers should examine
other Web resources.

For example, if looking for information about a public company,
check its electronic filings via
EDGAR. Even if the
business offers securities filings from its Web site, researchers may
discover inconsistencies or incomplete information by checking the SEC
database directly.

Note, however, that not all public companies file electronically
(see hardship exemptions at 17 CFR §232.201 and §232.202).
Furthermore, some filings are not available, or are only partially
available, electronically. Others appear as several separate documents
in the EDGAR database even though they comprise a single filing.
Researchers wanting to check on the status of a public company or its
filings should contact Disclosure,
the SECs supplier.

Information about most companies appears in the newspapers.
According to one comprehensive news media site --
The Ultimate News Link Page
-- more than 4,200 news sites reside on the Web. The next step in the
strategy for locating information about companies should include
examining national, business, or regional news Web sites.

Consider the size, popularity and business of the organization in
question. If articles about it are likely to appear in major news
sources, traditional online services like
Nexis,
Dow Jones and
Dialog may
serve researchers better since one or two well-formulated queries may
quickly retrieve most of the recent (since the mid-1980s) stories
about the company.

On the other hand, conventional online services do not provide
access to some regional news sources available on the Web. Further,
some news sources like the Philadelphia
Inquirer and Daily News
offer more extensive coverage via a Web site.

Other strategies for locating information about businesses include
finding their involvement in litigation, learning about their
legislative and regulatory interests, and discovering public opinion
about their products or services. Researchers seeking the most
comprehensive and facile access available to information about a
companys past lawsuits should search commercial online services
like Lexis
or Westlaw. But those looking
for inexpensive lesser alternatives might consider searching the
federal circuit court database
at Law Journal Extra!, or using search services like
Meta-Index for U.S. Legal
Research, or Villanovas
Federal Court
Locator, or State
Court Locator.

Researchers pursuing a businesss federal legislative or
regulatory interests should connect to relevant agency home pages or
to the governments
GPO
Access site. Resources, like the EPAs
Envirofacts
database or the SECs enforcement
actions, offer information about a companys dealings with
a specific federal agency. GPO Access databases assist researchers in
discovering a companys involvement in pending legislation or in
regulatory matters.

Those tracking public opinion about a businesss products or
services should explore postings to relevant Usenets and other
electronic discussion groups. Search database sites like
Dejanews,
AltaVista,
Excite,
Infoseek,
Ultraseek,
or HotBot assist with this task.

Researchers may also search the archives of many discussion groups
separately. To locate relevant discussion groups, review sources like
the Liszt Directory of E-Mail
Discussion Groups,
Tile.Net/Lists,
or CataList, the
catalog of LISTSERV® lists. To discover whether a particular
group archives its messages, send an information request to the
server. If the group is a listserv, for example, send the command "info"
in the subject line to listserv@domain.address. Leave the
message body blank.

To summarize, the Internet, and in particular the Web, brings
researchers valuable new sources for discovering information about
businesses -- the company home page, federal agency databases, news
sources and more. It also provides access to securities filings, court
databases, congressional documents and public opinion via electronic
discussion groups. Because some of these materials are unavailable via
traditional media, its difficult to ignore the Internets
import to researchers gathering corporate intelligence.

*One article abstract and citation reference to "Automated
Procedures for the Quantitation of Protein," Biotechniques
17: 5, 988-91, Nov, 1994 with an institutional affiliation search in
Medline
via the Community of Science Web
Server